Baddies beware, you're in Tony Abbott's cross-hairs

Confined to a darkened room after a spot of eye surgery, I find I've developed a piercing insight into the year ahead. January's gone, but I should share the rest with you:

February: RAAF Super Hornet aircraft accidentally bomb the Indonesian city of Surabaya. Immigration Minister Scott Morrison apologises for ''this regrettable error'', but refuses to comment further on ''In-Air Operations''. Prime Minister Tony Abbott warns that the world is divided between ''Goodies and Baddies'', and says his old friend, President Yudhoyono, ought to understand Australia must protect its borders. Back home from the disastrous Ashes tour, England cricket captain Alastair Cook is beheaded at Tyburn, his entrails impaled on pikes along Westminster Bridge.

March: Announcing an ''exciting new era'' for Qantas, chief executive Alan Joyce says the airline will quit all its loss-making international flights from May, shedding 14,000 jobs, to concentrate on the Australian domestic market. ''Going forward, we'll focus on our core business and profit generators, like the popular route from Brisbane to Winton in central Queensland,'' Joyce said. In a snap election, Comanchero sergeant-at-arms Rocco ''The Enforcer'' Obeid is elected unopposed as national president of the powerful CFMEU trades union. Australia lose the Test series against South Africa when their batsmen throw away the third and final match by an innings and 148 runs.

April: On his first visit to Washington as Prime Minister, Tony Abbott tells a nonplussed President Barack Obama in the White House rose garden that ''you have done a wonderful job for a black man, much better than we hoped for'', but warns that the world is ''a Manchurian struggle between Goodies and Baddies''. The PM's press secretary clarifies later that he misspoke the word ''Manichean''. NRL star Koby Ta'afa-afalau knocks himself unconscious with a one-punch uppercut to his own jaw during a Kings Cross nightclub incident and is charged with grievous bodily harm under the O'Farrell government's new anti-violence laws.

May: Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, 83, announces he will become a Muslim to marry Fatimah al Sultana, 24, the masseuse on his private jet and a princess of the Saudi royal family. Described as ''stunningly beautiful with a mind of her own'', Fatimah will be the fourth Mrs Murdoch after a magnificent wedding at the al-Haram Mosque in Mecca in August. News of Murdoch's conversion causes panic in 317 television and newspaper offices around the world. Veteran New Newscorp commentator Andrew Bolt is the first to recover, deftly informing baffled readers of Melbourne's Herald-Sun that Islam is a religion of peace and love cruelly slandered by the Christian West for centuries.

June: Reacting at last to yet another child sex abuse scandal, Cardinal George Pell, 73, resigns as Sydney's Catholic archbishop and joins the Vatican bureaucracy to head the Sanctum Officium Mulierum Obsequium, the Holy Office for the Obedience of Women. Federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne orders Australian schoolchildren to learn the names of the kings and queens of England. ''In my day we could list them all, from Alfred the Great to our own dear Queen,'' he tells broadcaster Alan ''Soho'' Jones. In Super Rugby, the NSW Waratahs vow ''to get the little things right'' after a record 124-3 loss to the ACT Brumbies.

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July: The Senate sets up an Un-Australian Activities Committee to expose traitors, terrorists, homosexual agitators and bestial sex perverts, the committee chairman, South Australian Senator Cory Bernardi, urging loyal Australians to secretly report suspects by name. ''Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear,'' he says. The ABC announces that British comic Stephen Fry will star in a "Fortnight of Fry Down Under," two weeks of programs in which the much-loved funster will host every ABC TV show from Giggle and Hoot on ABC4Kids to News Breakfast and Q&A.

August: Addressing a lavish banquet in Beijing's Great Hall of the People, Tony Abbott assures a bemused Chinese Premier Li Keqiang that ''a feed of sweet and sour takeaway was, um, a highlight of my childhood on, ah, Sydney's North Shore.''. But he warns of growing tensions between ''the Goodies and Baddies'' of the world. ''And we know who they are,'' Abbott tells Li. The Australian dollar plunges to a low of US48¢.

September: Newly married Muslim media mogul Rupert Murdoch tweets that ''Israeli oppressors must immediately quit illegal settlements on Palestinian lands in West Bank and Golan Heights''. New Newscorp columnists Miranda Devine, Janet Albrechtsen, Gerard Henderson, Greg Sheridan and Piers Akerman hail Murdoch's ''bold new Middle East peace plan''. The government's chief business adviser, Maurice Newman, says the science is ''still unsettled'' on whether the Earth revolves around the sun. Former PM Kevin Rudd denies he plans to challenge Ban Ki-moon for the job of UN secretary-general. ''Moony has my absolute support, now and for the foreseeable future,'' he says.

October: Secret documents leaked to the ABC reveal the RAAF bombed Surabaya in February after tactical targeters at Operation Sovereign Borders Command misread a circular stain left by a coffee cup accidentally placed on a map of East Java. ''Lieutenant-General Angus Campbell's eyesight is not all that good,'' a source tells 7.30. Enraged, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison accuses the ABC of treason. Senator Bernardi subpoenas ABC chief executive Mark Scott to appear before the Un-Australian Activities Committee.

November: In a tense vote at the UN, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon defeats challenger Kevin Rudd by 190 votes to nil, Kyrgyzstan and Lesotho abstaining. Tony Abbott urges leaders meeting at the G20 summit in Brisbane to sign an Australian-drafted communique declaring the world is made up of Goodies and Baddies. In a major diplomatic rebuff, they refuse. Down to her last £1 million, the Queen sells her country homes at Balmoral and Sandringham to Russian oligarch Igor Rasputin, 47.

December: Shocked by the failure of his one-punch laws to stem Sydney street violence, NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell says Kings Cross will be renamed Pleasant Meadows. ''That will keep the thugs away,'' he says. A coup by shareholders in New York sees a confused Rupert Murdoch ousted from the boards of New Newscorp and 21st Century Fox and replaced by his wife, Fatimah. ABC chief Mark Scott and three of his senior news executives are jailed indefinitely for subversion. Tony Abbott agrees with respected social commentator and academic Ray Hadley that ''they were playing on the Baddies' team.'' The Goodies rule.